Egypt: A New Secularism?

Arab political and social thought in the 1960s was dominated by secular conceptions, including Arab nationalism, Arab socialism and Marxism. Even after the 1967 war, when the attraction of these ideologies began to wane, the immediate “self-criticism after the defeat” (to cite the title of Sadiq al-Azm’s famous book) maintained a militantly secular and revolutionary stance. [1] The emerging Palestinian resistance movement put forward slogans of armed struggle and people’s war.